We've gotten a bunch of notes over the past week for the DayZ Modification for Arma II, Bohemia Interactive Studios' military shooter sequel (thanks LittleMe and Slippery_Jim). The requirements call for Arma II: Combined Operations, as Arma 2 free does not support modifications. Here's word on the mod's zombie-killing action:

Realistic "Zombies" with custom animations - These once human creatures will act and behave as if they have a heighten sense of hearing and smell but less sight, on top of that they use motion captured animations such as walking and eating from your unconscious body. If you look into any built up area you'll see them walking around waiting for their next victim which dares to venture in.

New weapons and vehicles! - Ever felt like you needed a Crossbow? Or maybe a less military like weapon? If you have then this is perfect for you as we have both of these created to high quality standards all ready for your use in this wasteland. On top of that you can even pick up the bolts fired from the Crossbow to reuse! Not only that we also have created custom vehicles which can be repaired and ridden around to show the world what you're made of!

DG wrote on May 17, 2012, 13:09:But £25 on steam for the game, with no Amazon sale over here.

Thats why you use amazon.com instead of amazon.co.uk to get the $15 sale. Its a digital download of the game.

DG wrote on May 17, 2012, 13:03:

Dev wrote on May 17, 2012, 08:19:And I'd rather give blue referral if he has amazon referrals, than giving that other game site a referral.

Hmm, last I knew for a referral to give credit you had to use the coded URL and have the referrer page (told to their website by your browser) be from the web site registered for that referrer and that web site had to have something buried in it so that Amazon could confirm the referrer-account was authorised by that website.

Has that changed or did it never really work?

No complaints from me about any ideas of Blue having a referrer. Though I'd prefer if he avoided using the system certain other sites have which automatically change all posted urls, even by forum users, into referrer ones. Admittedly I mostly hate that because my adblock kills it (US site anyway so irrelevant to UK'er like me) and the link is difficult to deconstruct.

It depends on how its setup. One way is to put something special in the URL, such as that amazon one you pasted. That is recognized by amazon (it receives the complete URL afterall) and any purchases from that link will be credited by amazon to the owner of that referral account. This is actually one of the most common ways to do referrals since it survives a copy/paste. Its also why those sites you mention automatically change the URL, so they can always get referrals when people click the links from them. I will often edit the links to remove the referrals, if someone is getting paid for my purchases, I want something out of it Blue though, I want the site to keep going so I wouldn't mind him setting up an amazon referral account for those who want to help him out.

The other way to do referrals is to get them automatically through clicking on a link on a site that takes you to another site. This is done automatically on anything you click by the way URLs work, and the site gets the info on where you came from. This is sometimes used to give a referral credit. If you open a new tab and paste the link in, it defeats this automatic version. Sometimes sites use this to block your view of their webpage if they came from a place they don't like. For instance, if a popular deal on a deal site had a way to get something free that a company only had wanted to give out to people coming from another site, they could look for all visitors from that deal site and give them an error message, while letting the ones they wanted the deal to go to keep getting through.

Bhruic wrote on May 17, 2012, 08:35:

Then they also aren't "crippling" steam if they aren't using it, right? For the purposes of examining if Arma2 sales are "crippling" steam as the other guy claimed, if its not a steamworks game, and uses a different browser, then those plays aren't loading down steam, and can be ignored for the purposes of looking at the claim.

How exactly would using it even potentially cripple Steam? That doesn't make any sense, so I'm not sure why you leaped to that conclusion based on the guy's statement. It seemed obvious to me that he was refering to people downloading the game. Lots of people downloading large games is what has an impact on Steam, not running games that have no interface with Steam at all.

So yeah, peak players has no relation to the number of people downloading the game from Steam.

It wasn't "leaping to that conclusion" it was trying to think of all possible ways it could hurt steam. I already addressed the content servers (which are NOT full) so game the downloads are not maxing them out.

Saw a vid of this the other day on Reddit, looked exactly like someone trying to do something I'd been hoping for a while. I'd also been thinking it did look like it needed melee though.

But £25 on steam for the game, with no Amazon sale over here. Not willing to risk the cash on an alpha mod that presumably requires rather a lot of resources to power servers despite no income. And all of that on a BIS game - a dev I generally associate with games as buggy as they are ambitious.

Dev wrote on May 17, 2012, 08:19:And I'd rather give blue referral if he has amazon referrals, than giving that other game site a referral.

Hmm, last I knew for a referral to give credit you had to use the coded URL and have the referrer page (told to their website by your browser) be from the web site registered for that referrer and that web site had to have something buried in it so that Amazon could confirm the referrer-account was authorised by that website.

Has that changed or did it never really work?

No complaints from me about any ideas of Blue having a referrer. Though I'd prefer if he avoided using the system certain other sites have which automatically change all posted urls, even by forum users, into referrer ones. Admittedly I mostly hate that because my adblock kills it (US site anyway so irrelevant to UK'er like me) and the link is difficult to deconstruct.

The mod has been created by an employee of Bis, and Bis has stated they will work with him to fix things specifically for the Dayz mod in the next 1.61 patch.

Also I read somewhere that the mod was tested by Bis in Arma 3 and does work. So I imagine the work to port it over will be negligible. Hopefully 1.61 and or Arma 3 fix some of the annoying bugs that keep it from being better. Bis/Arma 3 are fully realizing the potential gain in supporting this mod and this is only an Alpha so I can not imagine it will not be much improved upon.

Yeah I have been having fun with it, but you can see it can potentially get old after the initial fun/wow factor wears off if it is not expanded upon and improved.

Then they also aren't "crippling" steam if they aren't using it, right? For the purposes of examining if Arma2 sales are "crippling" steam as the other guy claimed, if its not a steamworks game, and uses a different browser, then those plays aren't loading down steam, and can be ignored for the purposes of looking at the claim.

How exactly would using it even potentially cripple Steam? That doesn't make any sense, so I'm not sure why you leaped to that conclusion based on the guy's statement. It seemed obvious to me that he was refering to people downloading the game. Lots of people downloading large games is what has an impact on Steam, not running games that have no interface with Steam at all.

So yeah, peak players has no relation to the number of people downloading the game from Steam.

Sales numbers and peak players numbers are two different things. The recommended way to launch the DayZ mod uses a separate launcher. If you use the launcher, Steam doesn't register you as running the game. So there are likely quite a few people playing that won't show up in the peak players tally.

Then they also aren't "crippling" steam if they aren't using it, right? For the purposes of examining if Arma2 sales are "crippling" steam as the other guy claimed, if its not a steamworks game, and uses a different browser, then those plays aren't loading down steam, and can be ignored for the purposes of looking at the claim.

If my reply was examining overall sales by looking at actual peak players for purposes of seeing how popular the game really was, then yeah, I should examine all of that.

Sales numbers and peak players numbers are two different things. The recommended way to launch the DayZ mod uses a separate launcher. If you use the launcher, Steam doesn't register you as running the game. So there are likely quite a few people playing that won't show up in the peak players tally.

Dunno, can you name a better/more immersive experience you can buy from steam for 30 bucks?

We aren't wanting to buy a mod, we are wanting to buy a terrible, horrible, broken game called ARMA which is required to run the mod. There's a difference. A game that's basically STALKER Online is a no brainer. Shame it isn't standalone.

It's not that broken anymore. Just a FYI.

Indeed, it's actually quite okay if you leave the usual clitches aside.But nevertheless this series is the most fun I've had in any game online ever (the legendary days of running around in OFP in a mission you quickly threw together yourself are unsurpassed)If you like polished AAA titles then yah, best to look elsewhere. This thing feels more like a graphical shell (not an ugly one at that) for something far more advanced than any big studio would even dream about doing.

Mad Max RW wrote on May 16, 2012, 20:50:Typically a game doesn't go on sale when it's on top of the sales charts. Right now the sudden high demand for Arma 2 is crippling the Steam servers. If you're waiting for 50% off it will be a while.

Actually, Amazon is going to have the Combined Ops download on sale for $15 within the next few days. Be sure to check their website tomorrow.

Is Arma 2 a steamworks game? I don't really like to get stuff from amazon unless I can get it into my steam account.

Dunno, can you name a better/more immersive experience you can buy from steam for 30 bucks?

We aren't wanting to buy a mod, we are wanting to buy a terrible, horrible, broken game called ARMA which is required to run the mod. There's a difference. A game that's basically STALKER Online is a no brainer. Shame it isn't standalone.

Yeah the "broken" line is utter nonsense, the game has been rock solid for ages now.

Mad Max RW wrote on May 16, 2012, 20:50:Typically a game doesn't go on sale when it's on top of the sales charts. Right now the sudden high demand for Arma 2 is crippling the Steam servers. If you're waiting for 50% off it will be a while.

Actually, Amazon is going to have the Combined Ops download on sale for $15 within the next few days. Be sure to check their website tomorrow.